Inventions That Didn’t Change the World

“Inventions That Didn’t Change the World” sounds like a book-length version of our Vintage Future series.

Author Julie Halls comes to the defense of such Victorian era oddities as “an improved pickle fork” and “an elastic dress and opera hat.”

“Trifling or otherwise, these designs provide a fascinating insight into the social history and technology of the period.  Some seemingly inexplicable inventions make sense within their historical context.”

It’s not hard to imagine our great grand children chuckling at more than a few of the apps created in our present “historical context.”

But as this review points out, all that stupid experimentation and unexpected discovery may seem pointless, and, in hindsight, laughable; but one could say it had a pretty important side effect:  progress.

Though human ingenuity reaches back into the dimmest past, the intensive production of inventions only began in the past few centuries…

In a Darwinian mood, one might contemplate these trusty devices as living fossils of invention, the flotsam left behind during the evolution that finally brought us smartphones. As one realizes in reading Ms. Halls’s book, the 19th century really invented invention itself, not just the production of occasional new devices but the unremitting, self-reinforcing stream of novelties that generated our present expectation of innovation as the normal state of affairs. We have become so accustomed to this process that we may forget to wonder when and how it gathered steam (literally and figuratively). Whatever may be the fate of any particular innovation, for good or for ill, we may never leave the age of invention.